Revolutionaries Never Die Review | Vital, Searching Doc Builds A Cinematic Bridge Between Gaza And Lebanon

“To be in the revolution, you must be optimistic”, someone says in the latter stretch of Mohanad Yaqubi’s documentary, Revolutionaries Never Die. It captures the spirit and ethos of the film that premiered in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente competition at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. It’s a profoundly moving, sobering paean to extraordinary resilience of people who’ve been battered again and again yet mine strength and purpose to power through.

The quest is of basic human dignity, which lies trampled under a mangle of threats, manipulation, coercion and trans-national violence. Joceylne Saab was one of Lebanon’s pioneering filmmakers and journalists whose work holds up a record of her country’s several crises and rockiest times. In 2018, she wrote to Yaqubi with a desire of collaboration. But soon after, she passed away. Close to a decade later, the Palestinian filmmaker and archivist has responded in the shape of this film, sensing resonances between his house in Gaza that was destroyed and Saab’s own in Lebanon. What transpires is a sweeping exploration of a national atmosphere.

Impelled by the echoes, he began parsing her archives. Hewing snippets from her films, he probes her tireless resolve to represent the brutalities witnessed by Palestinians, the Lebanese, even glimpsing the dawn of the Iranian Revolution. Since the very start of her career, she followed the woes of the Palestinians. She brings their quandaries to the fore, their zero social security. She’s transparent enough to establish articulation of the skewed circumstances. The Palestinians will get much lesser wages than the Lebanese.

“From the start, you sought to preserve our memories, splicing our history together”, his text interweaves, inscribing the images in a continued, living, dynamic correspondence. Most of the Palestinian students were at the Arab University of Beirut. Many go off to the Gulf to find work. She highlights the chasms among the Palestinian women regarding armed struggle. One reiterates there can be no political solution, only Palestine that must be guaranteed in existence and philosophy.

Lebanon has been home to thousands of Palestinian refugees. With sensitivity, wisdom and a panoply of considerations arcing between the intimate and the grandly historical, Revolutionaries Never Die traces the mapping, the communities, geopolitical intrusions. The documentary is a miraculous testament to Saab’s unstinting passion for the cause she believes in. Amidst terror and suffering suffusing the anecdotes on display, Yaqubi keeps seeking how Saab’s specific equation with what she documents, fearlessly and uncompromisingly. She trailed the Fedayeen too. Yaqubi realises that she’s not looking for death while encountering them, that she’s instead ploughing for a zest and love for life.

Reams of insight are scattered throughout the documentary. A throwaway line is particularly cutting as someone warns against the confusion of identity with religious beliefs. It’s a dangerous conflation which speaks directly to what beleaguers my country, India, assailed by a right-wing Hindu fundamentalist government.

Saab remained ferociously committed to covering the Lebanon war. They were times of extreme deprivation, forcing people to whittle down to the most modest scraps to get by. Yaqubi can’t help but marvel at her drive to document, ensuring the creation of an archive of memories and testimonies that would otherwise be erased or negated. Even as situations escalate, things get trying, Saab stays on track. She pursues her project not just out of idealism but an unrelenting steeliness. Saab embeds herself in what she’s capturing as a faint trace, not an imposing presence. She observes, listens and transmits. She reflects on the fear bred in the Lebanese, the psychological scars. A woman confesses laughing in the most wrong contexts. Another regrets getting accustomed and blase to a tide of deaths of loved ones.

Perhaps, the most haunting snatch of the film arrives when she mentions the sheer will force and the life-affirming conviction that gets people back on their feet the morning after bombs have rained. There’s death and devastation flecking anywhere the gaze follows. The images are desolate. Everything looks hollowed out and dreadfully emptied. From within the debris of a shelled place emerge its denizens united to live through the aftermath. Individualism is replaced by community and fellow feeling, each pitching in to haul the other through dire food shortages. People’s spirit isn’t vanquished. Rather, they are determined to see themselves through to a better horizon. The visions are of a ghost city, the pockets of whose embattled remains still harbour hope and reconstruction. This is what lingers the most from this film.

Revolutionaries Never Die doesn’t just “disrupt the repetition” between the ravaged houses of Saab and Yaqubi, across two homelands, but draws deep from her faith in coming out strong and unscathed even after enduring great horror.